Suffolk Camera Club and Aram Mirzadeh Present
Shedding light on Lightroom 3
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 at 7 p.m.
Bohemia Rec Center, 1 Ruzicka Way, Bohemia, NY 11716-2161, (631) 472-7037
An introduction seminar into Digital Workflow using Adobe Lightroom 3.
Free Raffle, refreshments, etc.
Please see the Shedding Light flyer for all details.1 Ruzicka Way, Bohemia, NY 11716
If you’re a fan of lightroom there are some absolutely great features, updates and add-ons to Lightroom 3. It’ll continue to work until April 2010 which is a good time to check it out if you are not a fan. Why would you be?!?
On the top of my list:
These are just the ones that I had been hoping for, there are various new speed enhancements as well to deal with the ever growing file and catalog sizes.
Head over to Adobe Labs for your own copy of Lightroom 3 Beta.
Well as all know one of the most useful tools when editing is to see how much you’ve changed. Sometimes you find it you’ve gone over the deep end on something and need to back off because whatever was, would work better.
In Lightroom, while under the “Developer” modeule (D) 2 has the (\) can be used to switch back and forth to the before and after image of your shot. With or without any edits.
What is going on is that the image is shown as it stands, compared to the “Import” usually the initial view. What if you had 12 changes, but only wanted to see the last 6 changes to a customer as before and after and not all of the other corrections?
The trick is to move the “before” stamp to a new spot on the history. Select the step you want to be “before” and on the History item, right click and select “Copy History Step Settings to Before”. Remember, that whatever history item you have selected is the “After”. So select the next point of comparison and use the backslash key.
Well I must have slipped or something because I totally over exposed this poor Dahlia.
As you can see I was holding the flash way too close on the bottom and totally overexposed the bottom of the flower. Well there is a an easy way to save this image.
If you don’t already know I’m a very big proponent of Lightroom. It has made my life so much easier. I can find sports images in seconds with the nice keyword searches, and I hardly ever go into Photoshop anymore. If I do, I’m there for 30minutes to a day because what I need to do is usually a huge task. The rest of the work is all done in LR.
This image can be saved in a matter of seconds.
First we need to identify the tool that we would like to use. As the overexposure happened from a side, this means we need to reduce the exposure of the bottom without changing the exposure on top. So the gradient (moving from one color to another) negative exposure is what we need.
First, lets switch to the Developer Module by either clicking “Develop” on the top row, or by hitting “D”. The gradient tool is a right below the Histogram on the right side of the developer module, and it looks like a box with 3 dotted lines going through it. The 4th option from the left, and 2nd option from the right. You can see it below circled.
Now choose “Exposure” from the drop down list in front of Effect. Next move the slider all the way left so that it reads -4.00. That’s right we’re going to way underexpose the image so that we can see where the gradient will start and end. Afterward we will pull the exposure back up and we’ll end up where we want.
Now click on where the image is “most” over exposed, and while holding the left mouse down drag the mouse towards where the exposure is correct. You should be able to see the exposure change as you’re doing this, if your computer is a little slow, just hold the mouse steady without letting go of the button and LR will catch up. When you’re happy with the size of the gradient let go of the mouse, but don’t click anywhere on the picture, if you do you’ll start a new gradient. If this should happen, click “Cancel” on the bottom right hand corner of the tool window. You can grab the old gradient to change it’s value by clicking the little white dot (handler) that is on the image.
As you can see we have underexposed the flower on the bottom now, but we can also see exactly where the gradient starts. If you know exactly how much exposure you need than you can set it from the start, but me, I can’t tell from the image how badly I’ve done something so I usually just go over and reduce as needed.
Now let’s increase the exposure until the bottom and the top matches.
As you can see we now have a properly exposure flower, ready to be matted and framed for the gallery or show.
Also, please notice that the history on the left shows us all of the steps that we completed. At this point I usually take a “snapshot” of the history point so that I can break this off and/or continue to play with the image to see if anything else can be changed to make it better. In this case I might run it through Noise Ninja once at a low setting.
Final export:
Since I just got my 1000th person telling me how they lost something because they didn’t have a proper backup, I thought I would point this fact out again. There really is no excuse.
“Mozy is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of your data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster your data is still retrievable.” according to Mozy.com. You can get a free account which allows you to backup 2GB of data for free. This can be your bookmarks and misc files. Obviously you’re not going to backup a great deal of images with 2GB.
Here is athe good news. They have an unlimited, single machine, option. Which means you can backup a single machine (all local storage) with a single price — $4.95 per month if you sign a two year agreement. That’ ~$104.00 for two years of unlimited backups and restores. You can even restore files remotely. I’ve been on the road and realized that I needed a file from my workstation. I’ve initiated a restore to my laptop from the road and gotten last night’s backup. Oh, did I forget to mention that the backups are in the background and seemless. They run when you don’t use your machine. No need to schedule a specific time. As you getup and go get coffee Mozy figures out what needs to be backed up and backs it up. They even keep multiple copies of files on their server, in case you need a version of the file from 4 days ago.
I, highly, highly suggest Mozy to everyone. You can use my referral code, this gives me 128MB added to one of my free accounts for everyone who signs up and actually uses Mozy. Or you can just sign up without it. Just start using it.
DISCLAIMER: Mozy is now owned by EMC. I have no direct affiliation with EMC or Mozy. However I do hold 401K portfolio(s) which at times may hold EMC stock, but they would not be direct holdings and not under my control.
